Swift Bolt
by LikeableTarsier
Summary: CloudSephiroth. Cloud's motivations. Stream of consciousness, a tiny bit fluffier than I usually write.


Property of Squaresoft. They don't own the yaoi concept, though. 

_"Veni veni venias, ne me mori facias" (Come, come, O come, do not let me die.)_ -Lyrics from "One Winged Angel" and from the Carmina Bura.

* * *

Swift Bolt 

From the first time we met I remembered everything about you. You were so cold that day, standing in front of us, the identical SOLDIER hopefuls, and giving orders like you had been bred for it. But then maybe you had. Your demeanor was that of an angel; impersonal, impartial, and brutally honest. Your expression did not change as you informed an endless line of boys that they likely would not survive a year in the Shinra regulars no matter how diligently they trained. Before this meeting I had imagined you to be glamorous; perfect hair and perfect clothing to compliment your perfect military record. Before I stood at attention to receive your orders, I had imagined you to be beautiful. You were not.

You were breathtaking. Awe-inspiring, powerful, your eyes especially, green like lifestream and unrefined materia, like a cooling heal spell after the burn of mako fire. It was reasonable to suspect that mako had given this coloration, you were a soldier, but I had seen a picture of you as an infant and your eyes where chillingly green even then, even at an age when your eyes should have been blue as all infants' are. I never forgot a single glance from those eyes, nor a single word from your mouth. Especially precious were those directed to me.

"This is your first time back to your hometown in a long time, right? How does it feel?"

Like heaven, to have shared it with you. And then you burned it.

I suffer no delusions about your intent. You were quite obviously insane at that point, driven mad by the lies of the Shinra and of your own father. Forgive me, but I hate your father. He did this to you. He made you a killer (which bothered neither of us) and a murderer, and then he did it to me as well by forcing my hand in your demise. Your eyes, as I threw you into the mako from which they had sprung, showed me the first emotion I had ever seen in them, and it was betrayal. How could I blame you for such anger? How can I forgive myself for blaming you?

My mission is to stop Sephiroth from reaching the promised land.

To stop you from irreversibly becoming the monster that burned the lone bridge to my past. To deafen your ears to the lunatic song calling us to the cliffs of our mutual destruction. You've danced in the flames of your own hatred and survived, but has your brilliant military mind? I fear that the mako has burned the depths from your beautiful, unfathomable soul. I feel your pull on me and there is a new element to it, something in your voice that wasn't there before, something filling the gaping wounds left by your destruction. Not until Hojo...

I will follow. I will seek, and I will find you. The madman will be destroyed so I may bathe once again in the calculated coolness of your eyes, which hides so well your tormented soul and your heart like lightning. You baptized me with your love and I threw it on the fire to extinguish my blazing town. I will find you and make amends, and I will come whenever you call to show you that you _can_ trust me, at least to be wherever you are. Even if being with you means I can't control myself, I will come.

But you weren't the one in my mind that made me attack Aeris in the pit left by the temple. What if I can't control what I do to you? Will that other, the velvet sheath corrupting the gleaming steel of your voice, tell me to hurt you, to make you more willing to be its host? I could not do that to you again. The voices of my misdirected anger in Nibelheim and the voice of that thing, they are not so different.

Surely I am the one destined to fight the corruption within you. I cannot give you up to it. And yet I fear what my attempt to restore you to sanity will bring.

I'm afraid. If this keeps up, I might go crazy.

...I'm afraid...

No. I will never hurt you again.


End file.
